To build the infrastructures of open civic systems that align with this holonic and polycentric view, new technological substrates are needed. Although the early stages of the internet were defined by peer to peer interactions between academic institutions, our digital commons was quickly captured by centralized “web2” entities like Google and Meta who realized that by placing essential internet services on their own servers, as opposed to self-hosted servers, they could extract attention and advertising revenue. What followed was a classic multi-polar trap in which misaligned incentives and the enclosure of our digital commons led to a race to the bottom in which the monetization of our attention became an arms race between increasingly monopolistic tech giants. At the core of these dynamics is the infrastructural failure of the “client-server” model which prevents users from interacting with one another outside of a centrally mediated server. To both address these dysfunctional system dynamics as well as create alternative systems, it becomes necessary to develop decentralized technological substrates in which users may interact with one another peer to peer and produce novel forms of autopoetic self-governance that are not possible within centralized technology platforms. Blockchains are one such technological substrate which leverages the power of encryption and competition between nodes in a network to secure an immutable ledger of interactions, maintaining trust between parties without relying on a centralized structure. While not without fault or its own forms of centralized capture, blockchains – and similar P2P technology – represent a significant step towards a technological substrate for civic infrastructure that supports composability and interoperability.